Slackwire While Cleaning the Dirt: How Emotional Caregivers “Make Sense” in Emotional Dirty Work

Abstract

Though we have witnessed a growing interest in emotional dirty work, little is known about how occupational agents work and construe meaning out of emotional labor mandated by their occupation. The purpose of this study is to examine how the emotional caregivers as the agents of cleaning emotional dirt experience ambivalence related to occupation and make a sense out of it. Undertaking a qualitative inquiry through twenty-one in-depth interviews of counselors, we find that the agents’ ambivalence towards the occupation is managed through both individual and collective sensemaking processes which are performed at the personal, occupational-group, and social level respectively. This work as the first of its kind converges the literature on ambivalence, sensemaking and emotional dirt. Additionally, we demonstrate through our study that emotional dirty occupations represent a unique interface between the occupational agents’ emotional dirt and emotional labor.